På udstillingen viser Jose Luis Martinat sit værk "The Commissioned Drawings". Jose skriver selv således om projektet:One of my recent works, "The Commissioned Drawings" ( 2006-2007) consists in a series of fifty drawings that I was commissioned for some months ago. I asked portrait street artists from Lima to draw me as dead. They got total freedom in deciding how to stage my death. I was very careful to not influence them on their decisions; I just posed as it was needed. Many of the drawings are very violent: me murdered, me after an accident or after committing suicide. They look like pictures from newspapers or films. One of them looks like a film poster. It's very difficult to get an answer to what it is that drives this people to construct pictures this way. Peru has a very violent background; very vivid in Peruvian lives is the memory of the time of the terrorism (between the 80's and the 90's). It was common to see very violent pictures of victims on newspapers and TV news. The media wasn't especially careful when showing these pictures. On the other hand, there are some pictures that have some kind of religious aura. When I asked the artists to portray me as dead, the reaction from some of them revealed their faith in religion. The presence of the Christian church is very powerful in Peru and as a consequence the vision of death as a punishment is very common. It is not strange at all that the influence of the mass media and of the Catholic Church appeared in this project. After all we are talking about two of the most influential and powerful image-makers in the history of Peru. But these people bring also with them their own personal and unique experience when making these drawings. I got to hear some experiences that they had relating to death and am I convinced that some of them tried to put that in the drawings. My intention is to continue doing this project in smaller cities in Peru where the influence of the church is much stronger than that in Lima.Among the lower class in Peru there is a tradition of portraits. Families go to the main squares in order to get portrayed. Portrait artists have the status of being able to project the real you on the drawings. I found it very curious that many people relate to the drawings as if they were real photographs. They use to ask: "How much is the price for the photograph? How long does is take to have my photograph done?" I heard this very often. For some people these drawings have the same status as photographs. Another part of the project was for them to portray me as a living person, a regular portrait. One of the artists wanted to talk to me first for a while before making the drawing in order to know me better and so make a better portrait. But at the same time there were some other artists who acted in the opposite way, promising me that they would draw me in a beautiful way. One said: "I'm going to portray you as if you were from Europe; you are going to be beautiful". Another artist, before finishing my portrait, asked me if I wanted him to draw a tiny birth mark that I have on my face or not. I showed these portraits later to friends and family, to know their opinion about which image that resembles me the most. They had different opinions.